For most actors, steal a simple fragment of a scene moment An incandescent talent like Denzel Washington would be a career coup. Even when the power dynamics of a scene promote the other actor, Washington is the guy we are going to look at, the energy and nervous energy ball which refuses to bend the knee or give in a centimeter of terrain. Washington wins scenes even when his character loses.

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So consider what Delroy Lindo does throughout the first act of “Malcolm X” by Spike Lee To be a miracle of Dance-Dance on water. As an anchie West-Indian, a Harlem Numbers pingpin who takes the arrogant young Malcolm under his wing, Lindo holds Washington in check. Archie has accumulated significant power in a mowled kingdom, and he knows how to handle it. He is a man of immobility and a meticulously measured threat. He studies this impractizing and ambitious kid with prudent fun; He invites his potential, but what he likes most is his obedience. Archie likes Malcolm to have a match struck by waiting for him the second where he raises his cigar after dinner.

It is flattered that Malcolm treats his advice on figures as if it was the evangelical truth, but Lindo allows us to see that this man sees many movements from the front on the champion. Does he spy a little of his ambitious young me in Malcolm, or does he plan slyly for the day he verifies this impatient protégé, with an elegantly deadly shift from a stiletto? All we can do is look at these wheels turn and, in this scene and several scenes, know that Malcolm is a strategic disadvantage that could soon become dangerous for his health.

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The ease with which Lindo dominates Washington is amazing, but his victory is all the more impressive when you realize that he beats the nascent movie star in his own magnetic game. Because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was almost exclusively a white person’s club in 1992, “Malcolm X” received only two Oscar nominations, and neither went to Lindo. It was only when Lee pressed the question by giving Lindo two other fleshy roles (in “Crooklyn” and “Camockers”) that Hollywood came. Over the next 30 years, industry has considered Lindo as a character actor, and it is a service that the professional interpreter was more than happy to provide. He is deeply in this pocket as a musician of Blues who loves delta slim fun in the film by Vampire Juke Joint by Ryan Coogler, but when he is also indelible in a film that is ready to be a phenomenon of pop culture, you wonder why more people do not write for him.

Delroy Lindo was born from Jamaican immigrants in London in 1952, which explains this accent of the Antilles finely shaded in “Malcolm X.” Lindo and his mother moved to San Francisco at the age of 16, and it was here that he began studying theater at the American Conservatory Theater. Lindo reserved small roles in John Candy’s comedy in 1976 “Find the Lady” and the continuation of the reputation more than this “More American Graffiti” before jumping the cross-country in New York, where he found a critical acclamation in the legendary Broadway productions of “Joe Turner by Athol Fugard”. For the latter, he obtained a Tony Award appointment for the best featured actor in a room, which probably put him on the radar of Spike Lee.

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After an absence of 11 years of films, Lindo returned to the big screen in the 1990s and gave a memorable performance in the extremely underestimated “Moon Moon” of Bob Rafelson. But unless you are passionate about Broadway theater in the 1980s, it is likely that Lindo came out of nowhere with his representation of Archie des Antilles. And this is where things become frustrating.

Lindo Was Never Going to Win Best Supporting Actor in 1992 (Gene Hackman Had It All Sewn Up As Sheriff Bill Daggett in “Unforgiven”), but it was absurd to snub him as a nominee in favor of david paymer (a fine actor with quite the hollywood rap) very Paymer performance in The vanity of Billy Crystal missed the failure “Mr. Saturday Night”. Curiously, the rejection by the Lily-White Academy of “Malcolm X” probably helped Lindo, because I cannot imagine that anyone had better roles while waiting for this scandalously gifted actor than Lee.

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The character of Woody Carmichael in semi-autobiographical of Lee “Crooklyn” was based on the filmmaker’s musician father. This not only talks about the confidence that Lee had in the actor, but of his belief in the versatility of the interpreter. Because Woody is another type of charmer. He is a musician in difficulty who, like so many artists, plays on his talent when the chances are too long and the potential payment is not worth the risk. Woody de Lindo loves his family and wants for their happiness, but he wants to succeed in his own words, and in this way the disaster resides. He is perfectly twinned with the equally wonderful Alfre Woodard, and sells his pink vision with an expertise from Harold Hill with honey, but we come to see through him and, in a way, wanting.

Lindo’s next film for Lee was “Camockers”, in which he gave one of the best performances in the 1990s.

Rodney Little is a Brooklyn drug pingpin which, like a fagin of the last days, welcomes lost children and transforms them into experienced and street levels. For Lindo, there is a psychological makeup in Rodney which is not too far from Archie from the Antilles. They are both expert tacticians determined to dominate a small pond devoid of intellectually formidable competition, but Rodney lacks archie defects. He does not participate in his own product and does not preach sobriety in his charges. As long as its employees keep their noses clean, the heat cannot touch it. And the cops who would like to bring it down, the detectives Rocco Klein (Harvey Keitel) and Larry Mazilli (John Turturro), hates that he manages a tight and faded ship.

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I mean Rodney is a sociopath, but it is really an inevitable product of its pernicious environment. The American government has created the circumstances that created Rodney and, at the heart of his twisted being, he believes that he is doing properly by young men in his Thrall. He takes a particular shine to the shot of Mekhi Phifer, a brilliant child whose inner anxiety was physically manifested in the form of a bleeding ulcer. The body of String screams him to resist Rodney’s guardianship, but his innate intelligence suggests that there is money and something approaching peace of mind if he continues on the paved path by his mentor.

Rodney is a dangerously positive influence. He praises the virtues of obtaining an education and barking to his children to do their homework, but if you question him, you could simply find yourself tasting the steel of a pistol. This is hit in a horrible scene where, after challenging Rodney, the mentor strikes the protégé in the stomach and pushes a pistol in his throat. Lindo was asked about this confrontation in A recent profile for the believerAnd explained that he had played the scene as a upset parent:

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“The pistol is only the means,” he said. “This scene fundamentally concerns a parent rumbling his child.” How dare you talk to me like that? Have you lost your head? Who are you talking about? “It is something to which any parent on the planet can relate, and the behavior – the pistol collection – is only an outgrowth of this.”

Lindo also did not receive an Oscar appointment for this brilliant performance.

The career of the actor of character of Lindo exploded in 1995 thanks to his representation of the scriptwriter / grass gangster Bo Catlett in “Get Shorty”, but the casting like hard -ended in uniform in films like “Broken Arrow” and “Ransom” was like the transport of wood with a Ferrari. Alas, the parts remained at the same range until Spike Lee served in Lindo a full meal with all the fillings like the character of Paul in “Da 5 Bloods”. Like many high -level Netflix films productions, Lee’s film initially received a vigorous push before disappearing in an abyss of algorithm which would prefer that you love the church of “Emily in Paris”. If you have never seen The power “Da 5 Bloods”, “ All you miss is a disturbed film star that is the equal equal of Fred C. Dobbs of Humphrey Bogart in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”.

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The realization of Lindo was not exactly not announced. The New York Film Critics Circle gave him his best honor as an actor in 2020, but that failed to take momentum for a film that Netflix abandoned during the awards season. It was therefore difficult to see Gary Oldman and Steven Yuen nominated that year for Si-Inpectacular Solid Performances in “Mank” and “Minari” respectively, when Lindo overturned his guts as a veteran of black Vietnam led mad by the greed of fortune.

What looked like another example of the Talent of Lindo taken for acquired struck the actor in a slightly different way. As he said to the believer:

“In general, I do not feel underestimated. I feel appreciated. But there have certainly been episodes not to be seen along the way, and there are episodes. I will give you an example. The academy has chosen not to see ‘my work in’ da 5 Bloods’. And I say” to “see” in quotes. [the British Academy of Film and Television Arts]The British version of the Academy has chosen not to “see” my work. The Golden Globes have chosen not to “see” my work as an actor. Sagging [Screen Actors Guild] The prices have chosen not to “see” my work “.

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I see you, Delroy Lindo. Anyone who understands the power of cinema can see you. We have to see more of you. Because no one can do what you do.